From the University of Glasgow: “Rosarium Philosophorum” From Collected Works 16: The Mercurial Fountain This picture goes straight to the heart of alchemical symbolism, for it is an attempt to depict the mysterious basis of the opus. It is a quadratic quaternity characterized by the four stars in the four corners. These are the four…
Carl Jung talks about the alchemical Mercurius Many treatises define Mercurius simply as fire. He is ignis elementaris noster naturalis ignis certissimus, which again indicates his “philosophic” nature. The aqua mercurialis is even a divine fire. This fire is “highly vaporous” (vaporosus). Indeed, Mercurius is really the only fire in the whole procedure. He is…
The Anima Arises from the Unconscious…. The anima belongs to those borderline phenomena which chiefly occur in special psychic situations. They are characterized by the more or less sudden collapse of a form or style of life which till then seemed the indispensable foundation of the individual’s whole career. When such a catastrophe occurs, not…
Correcting the Guiding Function of the Unconscious Thus the unconscious has a symbol-creating function only when we are willing to recognize in it a symbolic element. The products of the unconscious are pure nature. Naturam si sequemur ducem, nunquam aberrabimus, said the ancients. But nature is not, in herself, a guide, for…
Living with the Primordial Images of the Unconscious Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation, from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But besides that, there is a thinking in…
“We would well to think of ego-conscious as surrounded by little luminosities.” The hypothesis of multiple luminosities rests partly,as we have seen, on quasi-conscious states of the unconscious contents, and partly on the incidence of certain images which must be regarded as symbolical. They are to be found in the dreams and visual fantasies…
The Transformation of Archetypes Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and fairy tale. “But here too we are dealing with forms that have received a specific stamp and have been handed down through long periods of time. The term “archetype” thus applies only indirectly to the “representations collectives,” since it designates only those…
Letter to Gilles Quispel. 1950 To Gilles Quispel Dear Dr. Quispel, 21 April 1950 Please forgive me for the long delay in answering your question. I have so much to do and such an enormous correspondence that I often cannot catch up with it with my limited resources. It can easily happen that…
Letter from Carl Jung on the choice of the word “archetype” To Bernhard Milt Dear Colleague, 13 April 1946 Very tardily I am at last getting down to answering your kind letter of 28 November 45 • By way of excuse I can only plead that I have not yet regained my former working…